101. Cloud Native Applications

Host Joe Kutner is an architect working at Salesforce, and his guest is Cornelia Davis, the CTO of Weaveworks, a platform for infrastructures. Cornelia argues that most companies building complex web-based applications are doing so without fully understanding the unique operational challenges of that environment. Even several well-known patterns, such as adding circuit breakers or retry patterns, are not standardized across the industry, and certainly not across languages, let alone in frameworks and other easily consumable dependencies. In many cases, there are over reliances on infrastructure availability that only become obvious once a problem occurs. Cornelia gives the example of a massive AWS outage that occurred several years ago. For many companies lacking redundancy contingencies, their applications were offline for hours, through no fault of their own.

Another potential conflict between operational patterns and software design emerges around container-based lifecycles. If you have a new application configuration that you want to deploy, Kubernetes, which is designed to be stateless, encourages you to simply get rid of a pod and start up a new one. But it's entirely possible that there's some running code that doesn't know how to pick up these new changes, or even a service which can't recover from unexpected downtime. Considering these issues is the difference between running the cloud and being truly cloud native.

To the industry's credit, Cornelia does see more platforms and frameworks adopting these patterns, so that teams don't need to write their own bespoke solution. However, it's still necessary for software developers and operational engineers to know the features of these platforms and to enable the ones which make the most sense for their application. There is no "one size fits all" solution. As the paradigms mature, so too does one's knowledge of the interconnected pieces need to grow, to prevent unnecessary errors.

Links from this episode

Weaveworks automates enterprise Kubernetes
The twelve-factor app
Cornelia wrote a book called Cloud Native Patterns (get a 40% discount using the code podish19)